MacMost: Photos

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

The photo editor in the Mac Photos app includes a lot of shortcuts that can help speed up editing, especially if you need to make adjustments to a range of photos. You can enter and exit editing mode quickly, move between photos without leaving the editor, jump to different editing modes, and compare the original to your adjustments easily. You can also fine-tune cropping and rotations.

You can create a photo collage using any number of apps and techniques on your Mac. But the quickest, but still very versatile, method is to use Keynote. You can easily drag and drop images from Photos onto a slide and arrange them with lines, borders, text and other elements. You can then export as an image.

If you are running out of storage space on your iPhone, you may think that removing some photos is a good way to free up space. But using iCloud Photo Library means that deleting a photo will delete it from all of your devices. The solution is not to try to delete a photo at all. You simply need to turn on Optimize iPhone Storage in your Photos settings. This will allow your iPhone to manage your photos so that only small thumbnails are stored for most photos. The original high-resolution photos will always be in iCloud, and can also be stored on your Mac. Optimizing allows you to get a lot of storage space back, while still having all of your photos available to you. You can do the same for your Mac or second Mac to save space.

If you want to watermark your photos before sharing them using a logo or other graphic, you can build a semi-transparent image in Pixelmator and then use an Automator Quick Action to easily apply that watermark to any image file. A special Pixelmator watermarking action helps to make it a one-step Automator workflow.

Apple has removed the direct link between the Photos app and Facebook in macOS Mojave. But it is still easy to upload Photos to Facebook using the Facebook website. You can use the Media option in the file open dialog, drag and drop into the file open dialog, drag directly onto the Facebook page, and a variety of other options. If you have trouble picking out a photo this way, you can always enlarge the photos you are viewing, or drag and drop direct from the Photos app or the Finder.

You can easily add captions and other elements to a photo right in the Photos app on your Mac. While there doesn't appear to be a captioning tool in Photos, you can edit a photo and use the default Markup extension to add text without leaving the app. You can always revert to the original photo or go back and edit your caption.

If you wish to have some of the photos on your Mac available in iCloud, but not others, a typical solution is to use two Photos libraries. But a more useful solution for some is to link some photos as referenced photos, keeping them separate from your Photos library while including them as linked photos. These items will not be synced to iCloud and will not be stored in your Mac's Photos library either. You can bring these photos into the library later on using the Consolidate command.

A quick and easy way to create a video slideshow with your photos is to use the built-in Slideshow function in the Photos app. You can just select some photos, stick with the defaults, and get a video to upload to YouTube or Facebook in less than a minute. Or, you can customize the theme, individual photos, text and more to create something a little more specific.

With Apple's Print service being retired after September 30, many people are wondering how to order prints, photo books, calendars and other products. Apple opened up Photos to allow third-party printing services last year. Already, several companies offer ordered prints and products directly from Photos. More will probably appear after first-party competition from Apple is gone.

You can use Preview to combine more than one image into a single image. By using a trick to start a new document, and then resizing, copying and pasting other images into the new document, you can create a collage of images. Then you can export in the format of your choice to use in video projects, online posting, and so on.

The Memories feature in the Photos app will alert you with new Memories albums from time to time. If you'd rather certain dates, people or locations not trigger memories in the future, you can indicate that. If you'd also like to disable the notifications for memories so you can just ignore them, you can do that as well on the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

You can quickly and easily create a website photo gallery using the Photos app on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. You can simply make it public and share the URL with your friends and family. Once the gallery is created, you can easily add more photos to it.

In the Photos app you can hide photos both on the Mac and on iOS. Hidden photos will disappear from Photos view, albums and other views, but they will appear in a special Hidden album. This feature is not meant to be a secure way to protect photos, but just a tool to hide photos before deleting them or to take off photos out of normal viewing methods when they don't belong there.

Learn how to crop your pictures in the Mac Photos app. You can drag the edges to redefine the cropping area and then reposition the picture inside the new area. You can also rotate or auto-rotate the image and the crop will adjust automatically to not leave any blank space in the corners. Cropping is non-destructive, so you can always revert to the original photo or export it.

You can export a still frame image from a video many different ways with the software that comes with your Mac. If you are already in iMovie, you can use the sharing function to export an image from the current frame in the timeline or a library clip. In Photos you can save a frame in a video to your Photos library as a picture, and you can also copy the current frame and paste it into another app. The easiest way is with QuickTime Player where you can copy the current frame and then paste it into Preview or any other app that handles images.

The Selective Color tool allows you to adjust all of the pixels that are a similar color in a photo. You have six slots to make up to six color adjustments. You can use this to change a color in a photo, make colors stand out more, or desaturate colors to change the emphasis objects.

The main Photo library view in Mac Photos doesn't let you choose a sort order. But you can easily view your photos sorted by time or title by creating a Smart Album and using that to view your photos instead. You can also sort your list of Photo albums by viewing all of the albums and choosing a sort option, or manually dragging and dropping the albums.

You can create calendars in the Photos app that use your photos as the pictures. You can customize each month to include one or more photos, plus captions. You can also specify the items to be included on each date by using your own calendars. When done, you can order the calendars from Apple or print them yourself.

A useful new feature of Photos 3.0 is the ability to see all of your imported photos organized by the time they were imported. You can see all of your imports going back in time. You can use this view like any other, jumping directly to editing or organizing.